Part 10

Let me say at once that I have no idea of blaming my relatives. They were always kind to me; their homes were open to me, and when I came, I was a member of the family. Nor do I mean that I was troubled by jealousy. I mean merely that all my life I was faced by the contrast between riches and poverty, and thereby impelled to think and to ask questions. “Mamma, why are some children poor and others rich? How can that be fair?” I plagued my mother’s mind with the problem, and never got any answer. Since then I have plagued the ruling-class apologists of the world with it, and still have no answer.

The other factor in my revolt--odd as it may seem--was the Protestant Episcopal Church. I really took the words of Jesus seriously, and when I carried the train of Bishop Potter in a confirmation ceremony in the Church of the Holy Communion, I thought I was helping to glorify the rebel carpenter, the friend of the poor and lowly, the symbol of human brotherhood. Later, I read in the papers that the bishop’s wife had had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels stolen, and had set the police to hunting for the thief. I couldn’t understand how a bishop’s wife could own fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels, and the fact stuck in my mind, and had a good deal to do with the fading away of my churchly ardor.

From the age of perhaps seventeen to twenty-two, I faced our civilization of class privilege absolutely alone in my own mind; that is to say, whatever I found wrong with this civilization, I thought that I alone knew it, and the burden of changing it rested upon my spirit. Such was the miracle that capitalist education had been able to perform upon my young mind during the eleven or twelve years that it had charge of me. It could not keep me from realizing that the rule of society by organized greed was an evil thing; but it managed to keep me from knowing that there was anybody else in the world who thought as I did; it managed to make me regard the current movements, Bryanism and Populism, which sought to remedy this evil, as vulgar, noisy, and beneath my cultured contempt.

I knew, of course, that there had been a socialist movement in Europe; I had heard vaguely about Bismarck persecuting these malcontents. Also, I knew there had been dreamers and cranks who had gone off and lived in colonies, and that they “busted up” when they faced the practical problems of life. While emotionally in revolt against Mammon worship, I was intellectually a perfect little snob and tory. I despised modern books without having read them, and I expected social evils to be remedied by cultured and well-mannered gentlemen who had been to college and acquired noble ideals. That is as near as I can come to describing the jumble of notions I had acquired by combining John Ruskin with Godkin of the New York _Evening Post_, and Shelley with Dana of the New York _Sun_.

It happened that I knew about anarchists because of the execution of the Haymarket martyrs when I was ten years old. In the “chamber of horrors” of the Eden Musée, a place of waxworks, I saw a group representing these desperados sitting round a table making bombs. I swallowed these bombs whole, and shuddered at the thought of depraved persons who inhabited the back rooms of saloons, jeered at God, practiced free love, and conspired to blow up the government. In short, I believed in 1889 what ninety-five per cent of America believes in 1962.

II

Upon my return to New York in the autumn of 1902, after the writing of _Arthur Stirling_, I met in the office of the _Literary Digest_ a tall, soft-voiced, and gentle-souled youth by the name of Leonard D. Abbott; he was a socialist, so he told me, and he thought I might be interested to know something about that movement. He gave me a couple of pamphlets and a copy of _Wilshire’s Magazine_.

It was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind; the amazing discovery, after all those years, that I did not have to carry the whole burden of humanity’s future upon my two frail shoulders! There were actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become dear to me, that the heart and center of the evil lay in leaving the social treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach me was that they themselves existed.

One of the pamphlets I read was by George D. Herron; it moved me to deep admiration, and when I took it to my editor and critic, Paul Elmer More, it moved him to the warmest abhorrence. I wrote to Herron, telling him about myself, and the result was an invitation to dinner and a very curious and amusing experience.

I was in no condition to dine out, for my shoes were down at the heel, and my only pair of detachable cuffs were badly frayed; but I supposed that a socialist dinner would be different, so I went to the address given, a hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. I found myself in an apartment of extreme elegance, with marble statuary and fine paintings; I was received by a black-bearded gentleman in evening dress and Windsor tie--a combination I had never heard of before--and by an elegant lady in a green velvet Empire gown with a train. One other guest appeared, a small man with a black beard and mustache trimmed to sharp points, and twinkling mischievous eyes--for all the world the incarnation of Mephistopheles, but without the tail I had seen him wearing at the Metropolitan Opera House. “Comrade Wilshire,” said my host, and I realized that this was the editor of the magazine I had been reading.

We four went down into the dining room of the hotel, and I noted that everybody in the room turned to stare at us, and did not desist even after we were seated. Dinner was ordered, and presently occurred a little domestic comedy that I, the son of an extremely proper mother, was able to comprehend. The waiter served our meat, set the vegetables on the table, and went away to fetch something else. I saw my host look longingly at a platter of peas that lay before him; I saw his hand start to move, and then he glanced at his wife, and the wife frowned; so the hand drew back, and we waited until the waiter came and served us our peas in proper fashion.

Before long I learned the tragic story of my new friend. A Congregational clergyman of Grinnell, Iowa, he had converted a rich woman to socialism, and she had endowed a chair in Grinnell College for him. Being an unhappily married man, he had fallen in love with the rich woman’s daughter, and had refused to behave as clergymen were supposed to behave in such a crisis. Instead, he had behaved like a resident of Fifth Avenue and Newport; that is to say, he had proposed to his wife that she divorce him and let him marry the woman he loved. There ensued a frightful scandal, fanned red hot by the gutter press, and Herron had to give up his professorship. Here he was in New York, with his new wife and her mother, preaching to the labor movement instead of to the churches and the colleges.

An abnormally sensitive man, he had been all but killed by the fury of the assault upon him, and before long I persuaded him to go abroad and live and do his writing. He went, but not much writing materialized. During World War I he swallowed the British propaganda as I did, and became a confidential agent of Woodrow Wilson in Switzerland, and made promises to the Germans that Wilson did not keep; so poor Herron died another death. His book, _The Defeat in the Victory_, told the story of his despair for mankind.

He was a strange combination of moral sublimity and human frailty. I won’t stop for details here, but will merely pay the personal tribute that is due. I owe to George D. Herron my survival as a writer. At the moment when I was completely exhausted and blocked in every direction, I appealed to him; I gave him _Arthur Stirling_ and the manuscript of _Prince Hagen_, and told him about _Manassas_, which I wanted to write. I had tried the public and got no response; I had tried the leading colleges and universities, to see if they would give a fellowship to a creative writer; I had tried eminent philanthropists--all in vain. Now I tried a socialist, and for the first time found a comrade. Herron promised me money and kept the promise--altogether about eight hundred dollars. How I could have lived and written _Manassas_ without that money I am entirely unable to imagine.

III

The other guest at the dinner was likewise a person worth hearing about. Gaylord Wilshire had made a fortune in billboard advertising in Los Angeles (Wilshire Boulevard is named after him). Then out of a clear sky he announced his conversion to socialism, made a speech in one of the city parks, and was sent to jail for it. He started a weekly; he then brought it to New York and turned it into a monthly. He was spending his money fast, offering prizes such as grand pianos and trips around the world for the greatest number of new subscribers. He had a standing offer of ten thousand dollars to William Jennings Bryan to debate socialism with him, but the canny “boy orator” never took that easy money; he knew nothing about socialism, and the quick-witted editor would have made a monkey of him.

Wilshire always insisted that his conversion was purely a matter of intellect; he had become convinced that capitalism was self-eliminating, and that its breakdown was near. But as a matter of fact, a sense of justice and a kind heart had much to do with his crusade. To hear him talk, you would think him a cynical man of the world, a veritable Mephisto; but his greatest faults were generosity, which made it impossible for him to keep money, and a sort of “Colonel Sellers” optimism, which made him sure he was going to get a lot more at once. The advertising men in New York had assured him that the problem of a monthly magazine was solved when it got four hundred thousand subscribers, because at that mark the advertising made any magazine self-sustaining. Hence the prizes; but alas, when the four hundred thousand mark was reached, it was discovered that the big national advertisers would not patronize a magazine that in its reading columns threatened their privileges. So Wilshire was “stuck,” and went into the business of mining gold in order to keep his magazine going in spite of the advertisers. That is a tale I shall tell later.

The editor took me uptown and introduced me to two sisters, of whom the older soon became his wife. The couple came to Princeton on their honeymoon and became our intimate friends. Mary Wilshire was a sort of older sister to me--though as a matter of fact I believe she was younger. “Gay” printed my picture in his magazine, and introduced me to the socialist movement as a coming novelist. I wrote for his columns--I remember “The Toy and the Man,” wherein I poked fun at the desire of grown-up Americans to accumulate quantities of unnecessary material things. If you look about you at the America of sixty years later, you will see that my sermon failed entirely of its effect.

It was either that summer or the next that the Wilshires took us with them for a two-week trip to Halifax, the editor having got transportation in exchange for advertising. We drove about and saw the Nova Scotia country, at its loveliest in early summer, and went swimming by moonlight in an inland lake. Incidentally, I discovered some cousins--it seems that a branch of the Sinclairs had left Virginia after the Civil War; so here was a surgeon at this British Army station. Somehow I got the impression that he was not entirely proud of his young genius relative, with an unmodish wife who took care of her own baby. He did not invite us to meet the wealth and fashion of the British Army, and we had time to ramble alone on the beach, where the baby filled his chubby fists with masses of squashy starfish.

IV

_Manassas_ was completed in the spring of 1904 and published in August. Meanwhile I was reading the socialist weekly, _Appeal to Reason_, which was published in Girard, Kansas; it then had a circulation of half a million, and doubled it in the next few years. At that time two Western Miners’ officials, Moyer and Haywood, were being tried for a murder that they probably did not commit. The _Appeal_ was sure of their innocence. I was too, and in general I was becoming a red-hot “radical.” When the twenty thousand workers in the Chicago stockyards had their strike smashed in a most shocking way, I wrote a manifesto addressed to them: “You have lost the strike, and now what are you going to do about it?” This was just the sort of thing the _Appeal_ wanted, and they made it into a shouting first-page broadside and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. I wrote a second broadside, “Farmers of America, Unite!” The _Appeal_ paid me for this by sending me twenty or thirty thousand copies, which was like a present of a herd of white elephants! I had to hire a boy and a horse and buggy for a couple of weeks to distribute them over the countryside around Princeton. Two years later I ran for Congress on the socialist ticket in that district, and maybe my propaganda got me half a dozen extra votes.

I learned something about the American small farming community during my three and a half years near Princeton. What their fathers had done, they did; as their fathers had voted, so voted they, and thought it was for Lincoln, or perhaps Tilden. They lived in pitiful ignorance and under the shadow of degeneracy. I often thought of writing a book about them--but you would not have believed me, because the facts fitted so perfectly into my socialist thesis that you would have been sure I was making them to order.

In a neighborhood two miles square, which I knew by personal contact and the gossip of neighbors, the only decent families were half a dozen that lived on farms of a hundred acres or more. The families that lived on ten or twenty-acre farms contained drunkards, degenerates, mental or physical defectives, semi-idiots, victims of tuberculosis or of venereal disease, and now and then a petty criminal. You could descend in the scale, according to the size of the farm, until you came to the Jukes--I don’t recall their real name, but students of eugenics will accept that substitute. The Jukes had no farm at all, but squatted in an old barn, and had six half-naked brats, and got drunk on vinegar, and beat each other, and howled and screamed and rioted, and stole poultry and apples from the neighbors.

These small farmers of New Jersey and other eastern states represented what had been left behind from wave after wave of migration--either to the West or to the cities. The capable and active ones escaped, while the weak ones stayed behind and constituted our “farm problem.” Prohibition did not touch them because they made their own “applejack,” with sixty per cent alcohol. Politics touched them only once a year, when they were paid from two to five dollars for each vote the family could produce. They worked their children sixteen hours a day and sent them to school three or four months in winter, where they learned enough to figure a list of groceries, and to read a local weekly containing reports of church “sociables” and a few canned items supplied by the power trust; also a Methodist or Baptist paper, with praises of the “blood of the Lamb” and of patent medicines containing opium and coal-tar poisons. Such was agricultural New Jersey almost sixty years ago. The farms still go on voting for Lincoln and McKinley, and hating the labor unions that force up the prices of the things farmers have to buy.

V

A play called _Candida_ by a new British dramatist had been produced in New York. I had no money to see plays, but I borrowed the book, and it was like meeting Shelley face to face, a rapturous experience. Then came _Man and Superman_--I remember reading it in the summertime, lying in a hammock by my woodland cabin and kicking my heels in the air with delight over the picture of the British aristocracy in heaven--not understanding the music, and being bored to death, but staying because they considered that their social position required it.

I was supporting my wife now, after a fashion, and so was in better standing with my father-in-law. He had a six-week vacation in the latter half of the summer, and invited me to accompany him on a canoe trip in northern Ontario. My father-in-law was a city-bred man with a passion for the primitive; he wanted to get to some place where no man had ever been before, and then he would explode with delight and exclaim, “Wild as hell!” We went up to the head of Lake Temeskaming, made a long portage, and paddled over a chain of lakes some two or three hundred miles, coming out by the Sturgeon River to Lake Winnipeg. We took two canoes, and lugged them heroically on our shoulders, and learned to use a “tumpline,” and ran dangerous rapids with many thrills, and killed a dozen great pike in a day, and paddled up to a dozen moose so close that we could have touched them with our paddles. This country, which is full of cobalt and copper, is now a great mining region, but at that time there were not even trails, and the only white man we saw in several weeks was the keeper of a Hudson’s Bay Company post.

Here were Indians living in their primitive condition, and this interested me greatly. I asked many questions, and the trader at the post told me how in wintertime these Indians would kill a moose, and then move to the moose, and camp there until they had picked the bones. When I was writing _Oil!_ I remembered this; I told about “Dad,” my oilman, who would drill a well, and move his family to the well; I compared him to the Indians who moved their families to a moose. Later in the book I remarked, “Dad had moved to another moose”; and this got me into trouble with printers and proofreaders, who would insist upon making “moose” into “house.” I changed it back two or three times--until finally I received a letter from one of the executives of the firm, calling my attention to the difficulty; surely I could not be meaning to say that Dad had moved to a _moose_!

Going back home, I found _Manassas_ about to appear, and this was the psychological moment to make a killing with the magazines. Gertrude Atherton had published in the _North American Review_ an article speculating as to why American literature, with so many opportunities to be robust, should be so bourgeois. I wrote a reply, interpreting American literature in terms of economics; but the _Review_ turned me down. I took the article to _Colliers_, then edited by Norman Hapgood, and he published it. The article was one of the strongest I have ever written, but there was not a line about it in the capitalist newspapers. I could not comprehend this; but now, after it has happened to me so many times, I know what to think.

_Collier’s_ published another article of mine, telling the American people what socialists believed and aimed at. But that was the last. The editors accepted an open letter to Lincoln Steffens about his series of articles on “The Shame of the Cities,” which was appearing in _McClure’s_. I had written a criticism of his articles, pointing out that the corruption he reported came about because big business bought the politicians or elected them; and that there could never be an end to it until the government owned businesses, especially the public utilities. I sent the article to Steffens. He wrote me that it was the best criticism of his work that he had seen; he wanted _McClure’s_ to publish it, but they didn’t dare to. So I turned it into an open letter and sent it to _Collier’s_. I have told in _The Brass Check_ how I was invited to Robbie Collier’s for dinner, and how old Peter Collier, ex-packpeddler, announced to me that he would not permit my articles to appear in his paper and “scare away” his half-million subscribers. The greater part of the letter to Steffens was published in my book, _The Industrial Republic_, long since out of print. It contained a remarkable prophecy of our successive world crises.

Steffens and I became friends at that time. He remained always one of my closest and dearest friends, and we met whenever we were in the same neighborhood. In 1914, I remember, he came out to Croton, near New York, where we had rented a little house, and spent several weekends with us. Once I took him for a tramp in the snow before he had had his coffee. He appealed to my wife never to let that happen again, and she promised.

VI

_Manassas_ appeared, and won critical praise, but sold less than two thousand copies. The “men of this land” did not care about the heritage that was come down to them; or, at any rate, they did not care to hear about it from me. The five-hundred-dollar advance on this book was about all I got for my labors. I had written in the course of four and one half years a total of six novels or novelettes, published four of them, and the sum of my receipts therefrom was less than one thousand dollars.

Nevertheless, _Manassas_ was the means of leading me out of the woods. The editor of the _Appeal to Reason_ read it and wrote me with enthusiasm; I had portrayed the struggle over chattel slavery in America, and now, why not do the same thing for wage slavery? I answered that I would do it, provided he would stake me. The editor, Fred D. Warren, agreed to advance five hundred dollars for the serial rights of the novel, and I selected the Chicago stockyards as its scene. The recent strike had brought the subject to my thoughts; and my manifesto, “You have lost the strike,” had put me in touch with socialists among the stockyard workers.

So, in October 1904 I set out for Chicago, and for seven weeks lived among the wage slaves of the Beef Trust, as we called it in those days. People used to ask me afterward if I had not spent my life in Chicago, and I answered that if I had done so, I could never have written _The Jungle_; I would have taken for granted things that now hit me a sudden violent blow. I went about, white-faced and thin, partly from undernourishment, partly from horror. It seemed to me I was confronting a veritable fortress of oppression. How to breach those walls, or to scale them, was a military problem.

I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign-born and native, and they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes of everything. In the daytime I would wander about the yards, and my friends would risk their jobs to show me what I wanted to see. I was not much better dressed than the workers, and found that by the simple device of carrying a dinner pail I could go anywhere. So long as I kept moving, no one would heed me. When I wanted to make careful observations, I would pass again and again through the same room.

I went about the district, talking with lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, policemen, politicians, real-estate agents--every sort of person. I got my meals at the University Settlement, where I could check my data with the men and women who were giving their lives to this neighborhood. When the book appeared, they were a little shocked to find how bad it seemed to the outside world; but Mary MacDowell and her group stood by me pretty bravely--considering that the packers had given them the cots on which the strike breakers had slept during their sojourn inside the packing plants in violation of city laws!